One thing that may have died this week is a real possibility for net neutrality to become a fact/law. In simple terms, net neutrality is the ability for you to surf the net, send/receive data on your computers without any manipulation or spying. Net neutrality is an idea that all data packets are neutral/identical with no restriction. ISP's are not thrilled with this prospect because they have already fleshed out plans to prioritize traffic on their networks. They plan to get paid premiums by companies like Netflix in order to have their traffic prioritized so that you have higher more stable bandwidth then you would have with lets say youtube. They also want to throttle your bandwidth when you are downloading large amounts of data from sources they don't want you downloading from. Believe it or not Torrent programs are not all about illegal downloading, they are quite useful in legit business applications. MS, Apple, and google all have torrent files so you can download files faster.
The problem is, most of the country doesn't understand and take the tact of "I don't care as long as it works". That is fine for now but if businesses get their way now and nothing is done, once the ball is rolling, their is not going back. So let me put this in 1980,90's terms.
Lets say you pick up the old telephone and call your old high school buddy Jimbo. You have ATT and Jimbo has Sprint as a company. Well ATT and Sprint cant seem to get a new contract signed over some wire sharing agreement. So anytime you call Jimbo, you can only talk for about 5 minutes before being rudely disconnected. Moreover, anytime you mention that ATT sucks, you get immediately disconnected. And the icing on the cake, if you call anyone around the world that ATT doesn't like (maybe because it costs them more in their contracts with other companies) they just cut you off and maybe send you a nasty letter about it.
That would suck wouldn't it? You don't want anyone spying on your conversations! You don't want to be disconnected just because you call certain people!
Do you want your ISP to know every single site you visit on the internet and sell that information? Do you want them spying in on every bit of data your sending to see how they can profit?
Then you need to support Net Neutrality. The internet was designed to be a safe harbor for electronic information to flow freely and without scrutiny. You think Facebook and Google are dangerous with your data? You wait until Time Warner or Comcast get a hold of it!
All you need to know about which side you need to be on is that all of the ISP (In the USA only, rest of the world is against packet shaping), are against Net Neutrality and have been fighting the FCC at every turn. After all of these years with no way to shape packets(or cost prohibitive), why would they decide that freedom needs to end? Follow the money!
/Rant Have a good weekend All!